R.I.P.:

Denis Dutton, Universal Connoisseur (Joseph Carroll, 12/31/10, The Chronicle Review)

With the publication of The Art Instinct, Denis achieved the kind of breakthrough into the audience of generally educated readers that most of his colleagues in the humanities have only dreamed about. By speaking simultaneously to scholarly specialists and to the general public, Denis joined the glittering array of "third culture" writers such as Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins, Frans de Waal, Daniel Goleman, Matt Ridley, Nicholas Wade, and Edward O. Wilson. The term "third culture" refers to writers who bridge the divide between "the two cultures," the sciences and the humanities. Other humanists with an evolutionary orientation, myself included, have written books designed to break down the barrier between the sciences and the humanities, but we have not yet reached that broad general audience. Among humanists, Denis was the first.

Even without The Art Instinct, Denis would have had a full and interesting career. Along with founding and editing ALD, he founded and edited the journal Philosophy and Literature. For 33 years, that journal has stood as a beacon of clarity and educated good sense. ALD was designed to resemble an 18th-century broadsheet, and it thus offered a design metaphor for the ethos of the Enlightenment that also informed Philosophy and Literature. Denis believed in reason and evidence; he wanted to get at the truth of things. He believed in science, and he believed that science could illuminate every aspect of the human imagination. He looked back to the 18th century, and in the spirit of that century, he worked constantly to assimilate new knowledge in the spirit of empirical inquiry. It is for that reason that for the past 14 years or so, Philosophy and Literature has provided the highest-quality venue for humanists who, like Denis, are oriented to evolutionary biology.

Had he never written The Art Instinct, Denis would still have had a beneficent impact on the intellectual world, but his book was a triumphant culmination of his work over many decades. From the perspective provided by The Art Instinct, one can see that all his previous work—the dozens of articles and reviews, and the two major editorial efforts—was not episodic and fragmentary; it was part of a continuous creative development. The Art Instinct really could not have been written, by Denis or anybody else, before it was. Writing it depended on dramatic developments in the intellectual world that have taken place over the past 30 or 40 years—a Darwinian revolution first in the social sciences, and then in the humanities. Denis had to be in on that, absorbing it, helping it along, before he could write the book.

Though he recounts few incidents from his personal life, Denis's book has an indirectly autobiographical aspect. Through his multifarious references to particular works of music, painting, sculpture, and literature, he gives a strong, vivid impression of what it was like to have lived his life in absorbed, delighted responsiveness to the arts. He once mentioned to me that one of his earliest memories was of sitting on the floor of his parents' living room, at the age of 3 or 4, rapturously listening to LPs of Beethoven. What an immense blessing that power of appreciation must have been.